Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Edgar in the Closet

On Friday Murder in the Closet: Essays on Queer Clues in Crime Fiction, which I first blogged about here a year ago, was nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers Association for Best Critical/Biographical work. I both edited and contributed to this collection, which scrutinizes LGBTQ themes in and writers of crime fiction in the period before the Stonewall Riots, a pivotal moment in LGTBQ history. (They are coming up on their 50th anniversary next year.)

This is a subject area which some years ago I concluded, from my reading
in the mystery genre from around 1920 to 1970, has been seriously understudied in works of mystery genre history. Personally I was
continually surprised by how many LGBTQ crime writers, seemingly unacknowledged as
such, kept popping up from this period during my own studies (which had nothing to do, incidentally, with LGTBQ history), and by how
LGBTQ themes kept appearing, if necessarily in more oblique fashion than
today. "Murder, Obliquely," as Cornell Woolrichput it.

How had these themes not been acknowledged in the once quite popular and still critically well-regarded work of Patrick Quentin, for example (or the fact that the two men behind Patrick Quentin were for many years a couple)? Weren't we ready today, I asked myself, for an unblinkered appraisal of this body of work?

In 2015 I sought out people from both the blogging and academic worlds to contribute to an essay collection, and was pleased with the enthusiastic responses. The result was Murder in the Closet, which takes readers on quite a queer and colorful tour of crime fiction from Fergus Hume in the 1880s to the early George Baxt of the 1960s.

I'm so glad that the MWA has recognized the worth of this study. The other nominees are a prestigious group indeed, including biographies of Daphne du Maurier and Chester B. Himes by Tatiana de Rosnay and Lawrence P. Jackson and fascinating critical studies of the perennially popular Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes by Mattias Bostrom and Michael Sims. It really is an honor just to be nominated with this group, and I hope the nomination of Murder in the Closet may encourage some more people to rummage through the closets in the great house of vintage crime and mystery fiction.

OMG!! It's about time, Curt. I'm ecstatic you finally got your long overdue notice from the MWA. And -- of course -- I'm so proud to be part of this landmark book and equally ecstatic to say that I'm part of an Edgar nominated book! Congratulations to you and to all the contributors. Now go open a bottle of champagne!

Thanks, and thanks to you too, John, for your three essays! It's that kind of passion and commitment that powered the book. I feel this is one for the bloggers as well. they've done so much for the study of vintage crime fiction over the last decade or more.

Congratulations on getting nominated, Curt. You'll eventually get a life-time achievement award for all the work you've done promoting the Golden Age detective story and the people who wrote them. Keep up the good job!

I've only just come to this! Fantastic news and very well-deserved and overdue recognition for you. And obviously as a contributor I am even more thrilled... But it is you who deserves the credit, you must be very pleased.

Not something I was expecting, as I had gotten used to being passed over, but it was nice to see and I'm glad to see the recognition for the book and all the essays from everyone that went into it. As far as I know this is the first explicitly LGBTQ themed book to be nominated for an Edgar, at least in this category, so it feels something of a milestone in its own way.

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About Me

Author of "Masters of the 'Humdrum' Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920-1961"
"Magisterial"--Michael Dirda
"Edgar Committee, Mystery Writers of America, take note!"--Allen J. Hubin
"This should be a certain Edgar nominee"--Jon L. Breen, Mystery Scene
"Clues and Corpses: The Detective Fiction and Mystery Criticism of Todd Downing."
"Mysteries Unlocked: Essays in Honor of Douglas G. Greene" (editor and contributor)
"The Spectrum of English Murder: The Detective Fiction of Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher and GDH and Margaret Cole"
and the Edgar-nominated "Murder in the Closet: Queer Clues in Crime Fiction Before Stonewall" (editor and contributor)